The Importance of E-Mail to Romance (With Commentary by Abigail Adams)

Lately—and who knows why only lately—several of my friends, some male, some female, all of them currently in crawl position in the dating trenches, and all of them writers, have suffered cruelly from what I’ll call Disproportionate E-mail Response syndrome. This occurs when one party writes a crafted, light-hearted e-mail intended to establish a rapport with a second party, and receives in return, precisely twenty-four hours later, an e-mail consisting of just one line or sometimes just one word. The word might be “Cool” or “O.K.” The line might be “Talk soon” or “What did you have in mind?” Such volleys, lobbed, I hope, in complete ignorance of their harmfulness, can be devastating; can cause their victims to flatten out and pull their helmets down over their eyes.

Accepting the proposition—one put forth by many coupled people when pressed for an opinion—that a terse e-mail might indicate not a lack of interest but an embarrassment of interest is difficult, and here’s why: for the present-day desk-bound, sociable, educated, literary, romantically inclined worker, e-mail—and its real-time offspring—is the tie that binds. Trapped, willingly or not, in a cubicle with a computer, sensitive people will spend their days talking to the computer—they will exchange with one friend or with fifty hundreds of e-mails on a single news story (or on the evening’s plans), and leave five chat windows open throughout the day. These communications are hardly intermittent. They take place at the same time that “real” work is being done in an adjacent window (is it just me or are we all beginning to look a little exotropic?). The point is that the sender of the friendly e-mail who receives a curt response is justified in asking, If you aren’t going to e-mail with me all day like a normal person, why would I date you?

It turns out that such hysteria over disparate written-communication styles is not peculiar to either e-mail or the present day. Someone recently lent me a copy of “The Quotable Abigail Adams,” out last year from Harvard, which contains a chapter called “Communications.” I let out a long whistle when I finished reading it. Let’s just say that John Adams could have pled that he was too busy writing the Declaration of Independence to write letters and it wouldn’t have got him off the hook with Abigail. Sometimes, she is direct about the matter: “I never think your Letters half long enough.” Sometimes, she attempts to make her point with a royal “we”: “A short Letter always gives one pain as well as pleasure since a few lines only from such a distance looks as if the Friend we wrote to possessd but a small share of our attention and regard.” Sometimes, she tries flattery: “Don’t fail of letting me hear from you by every opportunity, every line is like a precious Relict of the Saints.” And sometimes she spells out Exactly what she wants:

I want some sentimental Effusions of the Heart. I am sure you are not destitute of them, or are they all absorbed in the great publick. Much is due to that I know, but being part of the whole I lay claim to a Larger Share than I have had. You used to be more communicative a Sundays. I always loved a Sabeth days letter, for then you had a greater command of your time—but hush to all complaints.

The lessons I take from Abigail’s discontentment are: 1) Our emotions will always outwit technological advances–she waited weeks for a too-short letter from John and suffered greatly, but were she alive today she would no doubt suffer just as greatly waiting twenty-four hours for a too-short e-mail from John. 2) You might as well say what you want, because although you probably won’t get it (Abigail’s complaints span decades), it feels worse to hold it in. 3) Terseness does not necessarily indicate an absence of interest (I am conceding this point).

Of course, there is something to be said for simply disengaging one’s enemy entirely, should you ever find yourself down in the trenches, locked in battle with an anti-e-mailer/object of affection. In another chapter in “The Quotable Abigail Adams,” called “War,” Abigail reminds us that it is sometimes better to “suffer temporary privations, than the calamities of War, which when once commenced, no one can calculate or estimate.”